This Week in Social Media

Welcome to the first installment of a weekly series re-capping the week in social media news. As we all know, things happen fast in the social media industry, that’s why we’ll be keeping you up to speed on the biggest stories, studies, and updates you should be aware of.

1. Instagram FINALLY updated their API

Social media managers around the world are probably still rejoicing the big news on Tuesday. Instagram announced updates to their API allowing content scheduled with Falcon.io to no longer require 3rd party apps to receive the post at a preselected time then redirect to Instagram’s app to publish. Starting on Wednesday, photos can be published directly to your Instagram Business account.

2. Speaking of 3rd party tools… Does using them negatively affect post reach?

There’s always been a lingering question in social media marketers’ minds that algorithms might reward content posted posted natively with more reach compared to using a 3rd party tool. Buffer’s case study mentioned in their podcast this week found that the answer to that is, thankfully, no.

"We did not find a significant difference in social media reach and engagement whether we posted through 3rd-party tools or natively to each network. As you might expect, some pieces of content performed better than others no matter how they were posted."

Pro tip: Never buy fake followers. It might look cool, but there’s two reasons why it’s a bad idea. First, if the social media network finds out you bought them, they can squash your reach, or worse, since it could violate their Terms of Service policy. Second, you could find your way in a fascinating New York Times investigative piece on fake followers, and that's never good for business. This news led to the New York Attorney General opening his own investigation into the company behind this, so yeah, buying fake followers is really bad.

5. Snapchat enters e-commerce

All eyes are on Snapchat in 2018. The popular social network with millennials has a devoted user base of approximately 178 million daily users, but a quick glance at the trends of Snap Inc.’s stock paint a dark picture of the company's potential danger. Last week, there was news that Snapchat will be rolling out the ability to share content on Twitter and Facebook, and on Thursday they announced the Snap Store.

Snapchat's obviously making moves to grow their users and earn more revenue, and adding an e-commerce platform with their millennial base could be a profitable venture, but only time will tell.

The biggest news of the week is definitely the Instagram API update. Even though it's only currently allowing single photo posts to be published automatically, it's a great sign that Instagram is publicly warming up to the potential their platform gives marketers and brands big and small.

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